Boston Consulting Group released a number this week that every executive should see before sending the next AI update to staff. In the new edition of its CEO Insomnia Index, published October 14, nearly 90% of CEOs said they’re confident their employees trust their leadership. Only 46% of employees agreed.
On AI in particular, four in ten employees told BCG their CEO has not been transparent enough about how AI will affect their roles and career opportunities. Just 15% of CEOs worry that their approach to AI could erode employee trust.
That is a wide gap. The good news is that most of it can be closed with better communication, and a lot of that work starts with the next memo.
What the BCG research found
BCG surveyed 645 CEOs of companies with at least $100 million in revenue, along with 500 nonexecutive employees. A few of the findings stood out to me:
- Nearly 70% of CEOs believe employees trust them to put employee well-being first when deciding how to fund major priorities. Only 36% of employees said the same.
- Half of the employees whose trust went up because of how their CEO handled AI said they’re more willing to go above and beyond than they were three months ago. Among employees whose trust in their CEO’s AI leadership eroded, fewer than 10% said that.
- 58% of CEOs said they are not concerned about rising employee disgruntlement.
That second point is the one I’d show a CFO. Trust shows up in effort, and effort shows up in results. Matthias Tauber, a BCG managing director and senior partner, put the problem plainly: “CEOs assume that since employees hear their words, that’s enough to build trust, but employees also judge CEOs by their actions.”
Other research points the same direction. The Institute of Internal Communication’s IC Index 2026, based on a survey of 5,000 UK employees at organizations with 500 or more people, found that half of employees do not trust their CEO or senior leaders. Only 49% agreed the reasons behind organizational changes are clearly communicated to them. And most employees said they have ten minutes or less a day to engage with internal communication at all.
A live example from Simon & Schuster
You can watch this trust gap play out in real time at Simon & Schuster. Publishers Weekly reported on October 7 that employees were gathering signatures for an open letter to CEO Greg Greeley stating “strong opposition” to using Skan AI or similar software that analyzes workplace activity.
The letter’s language shows what people assumed. It described a technology that “tracks employees’ keystrokes” and warned it would “further degrade trust in leadership.” It also noted that trusting company leadership was already one of the lowest-scoring categories in the company’s internal Gallup survey, year after year.
Greeley’s October 6 memo to staff, shared with Publishers Weekly by a company spokesperson, said some teams were exploring AI to cut administrative work like “duplicate data entry, approval chasing, manual status reporting.” Then he wrote this: “To be clear: no decision has been made to use Blueprint or any other productivity-monitoring or workflow-analysis tool, and there is no company-wide rollout underway or under consideration.”
That is a good sentence. It’s specific, it names the tool, and it puts a limit in writing. I don’t know the internal timeline at Simon & Schuster, and I’m not going to guess at it. But the episode shows something I see in a lot of organizations. Once employees hear “AI” and “workflow analysis” in the same breath, many of them will hear “surveillance” and “layoffs” unless leadership has already told them otherwise. A clear memo that arrives after people have formed that picture has to work much harder.
What to do before your next AI announcement
I spent 14 years in broadcast media, and radio teaches you quickly that dead air never stays empty. Listeners fill it, usually with the idea that something has gone wrong. Employees do the same with silence about AI. Here’s how I’d advise a leadership team to get ahead of that.
- Answer the question people are really asking. For most employees, the question is some version of “What happens to my job?” Say what is changing and what isn’t. If some answers aren’t settled yet, say that too. If you can’t promise something, don’t imply it.
- Put the limits in the first message. If a tool will not be used to rate individual performance, say so in writing on day one. Greeley’s “To be clear” line is the right kind of sentence. Use it early, before anyone has to ask.
- Brief managers before the all-hands. Frontline managers get the hallway questions, and the BCG and IC Index numbers suggest employees don’t automatically take the CEO’s word for it. Give managers a one-page Q&A and a day to absorb it so they aren’t hearing the news at the same time as their teams.
- Show something people can check. Share a pilot team’s actual results, or publish a short policy on what data the tool collects and who gets to see it. This is Tauber’s point about actions. People believe what they can see.
- Write for a ten-minute day. If most employees have ten minutes or less for internal communication, the first two sentences of your memo carry most of the load. Lead with what changes for them. The strategy rationale can come second.
Test your own read on trust
The hardest lesson in the BCG data is that the person most confident about employee trust is often the CEO. There’s a simple reason for it. Executives hear from people who report to them, and those people tend to soften bad news on the way up.
So build in ways to hear the unfiltered version. Add two or three AI-specific questions to your next anonymous pulse survey, such as whether employees understand how AI will affect their role and whether they believe what leadership has said about it. Hold skip-level conversations where a vice president sits down with front-line staff without their direct manager in the room. Ask your managers what questions they’ve been getting that never make it to the town hall.
And pay attention to quiet. A town hall Q&A with no hard questions about AI usually doesn’t mean everyone is on board. Sometimes it means people have decided it isn’t safe or worthwhile to ask. The IC Index found only 49% of UK employees agree people can share their opinion without fear of negative consequences. If your people are in that other half, a polite room is telling you something.
The companies that come out of this period with their workforce still on their side will be the ones whose leaders told people the truth early and then did what they said they would do.
If you’re planning an AI rollout or another big change and want help shaping how you’ll talk with employees about it, schedule a consultation and let’s work through it together.